Collision of utopias: Vasco de Quiroga's mission to the Purhepecha-Chichimec of Michoacan, Mexico, 1537-1565

This dissertation is an examination of the 16th century Spanish conquest and evangelization of the Purhepecha-Chichimec people of Michoacan, Mexico. The study aims to understand the complex historical and cultural factors which have influenced the region's particular brand of Amerindian Catholicism. Towards this objective, I focus on the Spanish response to the "spiritual conquest" by examining one of the great figures of the period, Don Vasco de Quiroga, 1477/78-1565.;Vasco de Quiroga served as the first bishop of Michoacan at the Purhepecha capital of Tzintzuntzan from 1537 to his death in 1565. There he promoted a policy to evangelize the natives by congregating them into pueblo-hospital communities. Quiroga drew his model for the towns from Thomas More's Utopia, which spoke of a "perfect" Christian commonwealth. Both Quiroga and the mendicant friars planned to acculturate the Amerindians into what they believed to be the "best of Christianity." In this way they hoped to construct an Amerindian church which would achieve salvation within the world, through the practice of a rigorous daily devotion, hard agrarian work, modest dress, monogamy, and the sanctification of poverty.;In order to provide a typology for understanding the encounter between the Purhepecha religion and Spanish Catholicism, I begin my analysis with an interpretation of the cultural boundaries of each tradition, and the cognitive maps that comprise their respective worldviews. I have organized the dissertation into eight chapters. Chapters one and two investigate the pre-Columbian socio-cultural context of the Purhepecha, and their rise to power in western Mexico in the late thirteenth century. Chapters three and four examine the historical and cultural landscape of Spain on the eve of the conquest of Mexico, and the particular features of Iberian piety that play an important role in the translation of Renaissance Christianity to the "New World." The remaining four chapters focus on the work and ideals of Vasco de Quiroga in realizing of the goals of the mission project.;Ultimately, I illustrate the complexity and sophistication of both the Spanish and Purhepecha culture-systems, their shifting patterns, adjustments, and the transformations each culture experienced at the time of their ill-fated encounter. I argue that each culture-system was not a static entity. Both cultures had been shaped by the dynamic processes and developments of their respective histories. On their field of collision in the sacred land of lake Patzcuaro, the Spanish and Purhepecha met and judged one another, according to the long established sacred and profane forces which each believed controlled and ordered human and divine life.